


Soulmates 2.0

by Ghelik



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Gen, Multiverse, Near Future, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-10 07:51:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11687259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghelik/pseuds/Ghelik
Summary: Ever since I was a child I knew I had a soulmate. He's a soldier. I know this because our soul-bond is so strong I get all of his random injuries and this one looks definitely like a bullet hole.Or at least that's what I thought.Turns out the truth is even less believable.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So here's a small something I've been working on for some time now and I just sort of found laying around in my Dropbox.

People tend to think that having a soulmate is this fucking beautiful and romantic fairy tale ending; that it means that you’ll find the love of your life; that you won’t end up alone. That’s what the ads sell you, what’s cinematographically profitable: showing only the friendship and beautiful bond between two individuals, the star-crossed lovers; the heart-wrenching connections…

 

But having a soulmate isn’t romantic, beautiful or has anything to do with you since you’re just a body hosting a soul. And you might think this is nothing but the bitter opinion of someone with no soulmate. But I do have a soulmate and if I’m bitter is most certainly his fault.

 

In the scientific community the soulmate-thing has two main theories:

 

One that says that all souls come from the same “soul-source” and basically your soul is tied to that. Depending on how close you’re linked to it you get shocks from other souls. The explanation for this has a lot to do with the chemistry in the brain and phantom pains and what not. I fell asleep halfway through the explanation, and the only thing I want to have to do with the whole soulmate shit is to get rid of it.

 

The second more “myth accurate” theory goes somewhat like this: your soul is living two – or three or four – different lives all at once and you get impressions from the other lives. Ever woken up with random bruises or scratches you don’t know who put there? Congratulations, you have a soulmate somewhere, and it’s a clumsy one.

Some connections are stronger than others, and nobody knows how to sever the connection or how to calculate how close you’re to your soulmate. There are stories of people dying because their soulmate kicked the bucket. One of my closest friends, Jake, is alive thanks to Chris, his soulmate’s thoughtfulness – and by thoughtfulness I mean his soulmate carries an inhaler everywhere since Jake can’t seem to remember his own bloody lung-condition.

 

So, yeah, connections can be beautiful. Jake and Chris’ have been best buddies since before they met. Others can be fucked: where you get all the pain and none of the joy. Where your soulmate is a fucking soldier.

 

I think I can be bitter about the whole soulmate thing.

 

In the older days soul reading was done as a ritual of passage in which you dressed up in fancy clothes and got a party thrown for you in which the soul reader would perform a ceremony and tell you in some spectacular manner if you have a soulmate – turns out most people do – and sometimes even who that is.

 

I can only imagine how awkward it must have been back in the day to announce your soulmate is your brother or something. It happened to my moms’ cousin; apparently, she was a big romantic and cried for weeks, refusing to speak to her brother ever again. Nowadays the reading is done whenever. Sometimes parents pay handsomely for a reader to read their baby’s soul. There are some stories on the Internet of people adopting old people, abandoned in residential homes because they’re the soulmate of their baby and the baby was getting all the sadness of the old person. It’s nice, I guess.

 

I only went to the reading because my best friend didn’t want to go alone and guilt-tripped me into it – there might have been some bribing involved, like a lot of fancy peanut-butter-and-cookie-flavoured ice-cream and chocolate, what can I say? One’s not made of stone.

 

Since we’re both broke Megan found a reader that did cheap readings behind a tattoo-parlour/drug-den. It’s the shadiest thing we’ve ever done and it sort of added to the thrill. Megan’s a hard-core romantic who believes in love at first sight, the pull of a soul towards its mate, that romantic relationships with your soulmate – as long as your soulmate isn’t like your brother, or some creepy old dude – are beautiful and every other cliché ever conceived. I’ve never really liked the whole concept, never believed the romanticism behind being psychologically tied to somebody else and find it kind of ridiculous that the entire soulmate-thing is such a big part of our culture.

 

But as I said: bribery brought me here, so I too pay the fifty clicks and duck inside the readers’ office while Megan waits for her turn.

 

The reader’s room is decorated with a ton of colored glass in all shapes and sizes. Glass curtains hang from the walls, glass beads filling bowls, the table-top is made out of small glass shards smoothed by river water. The only thing not made out of glass seems to be the wooden deer mask that hangs on the wall, looking big and menacing. One of the horns is broken off, and the deep eye-sockets are lined with mirrors at the bottom. It’s really creepy. The whole office has a strong incense scent and is dimly lit. Which only adds to the creepiness of it all. The reader stands very still at the other end of the room when I enter, and it takes me a moment to notice him. I nearly jump out of my skin but manage not to scream.

 

Small mercies.

 

He’s a tall man with dark eyes and a bandana made out of some hideous yellow cloth tied around his brow. His eyes are dark and knowing, and he might have been attractive, if not for the arrogant way he carries himself like he isn’t just some cheap-ass reader – some cheap charlatan - in a tiny room on the back of a shady tattoo-parlour.

 

“Welcome,” he smiles, but it doesn’t really reach his eyes. “My name is Buck Stag.”

 

I can’t help but glance at the deer mask behind him. I think I see him shudder, but that might have been a trick of the light.

 

“Please, take a seat.”

I sit in a rickety lawn chair that digs uncomfortably into my thigh through the thin, ugly red pillow on the seat while Buck Stag – really? – picks up a glass bowl filled with water from one of the shelves beneath the mask and places it in my outstretched hands. He then takes a bunch of colored glass beads from one of the many bowls strewn through the tiny room and throws them carelessly into the water with a splashy plop.

 

He folds elegantly into the chair across from me. For half an eternity we watch the ripples in the water. Then…

 

“Well, fuck.”

 

The reader leans back in his own rickety lawn chair, staring at me with dark red-rimmed eyes, a tiny frown on his brow.

 

“What? “

 

“Well, it would be significantly easier to tell you, you don’t have a soulmate,” he grumbles, stretching down and picking a bottle filled with amber-coloured liquid and taking a generous swing of it. “But you already know you have one, don’t you?“

 

I have known it for a while – more specifically since I was eight and woke up screaming with a broken hand. The scar from the puncture wound looks like a stabbing, all puckered and terribly ugly. It’s one thing to wake up with random bruises, another to do it with broken bones or a bum knee that bucks beneath me from time to time for no apparent reason.

 

The reader scratches at his arm absently. He’s wearing a mustard colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a burgundy waistcoat. He offers the bottle to me, smiling warily when I decline, then takes another liberal swing.

 

“Well,” he grumbles more to himself than to me “Let’s get this shit over with. What do you know of the multiverse? Are you familiar with the word?“

 

I scoff.

 

I’ve read my fair share of science-fiction. At school, some of my best friends were obsessed with the whole multiverse theories: the possibility that there are different versions of you out there, who turned left instead of right and ended up having a whole different life than you do.

It’s a nice thought, I wish Other-Universe-Me has had better luck and has been smarter when making her life choices.

 

“Yeah. So?”

 

“So your soulmate is in a different universe. Like, in a parallel world.”

 

I can feel myself blinking dumbly at him, mouth slack and the scar on my hand itching. It does that sometimes.

 

Things you expect when going to a reader: you’re be mortified discovering that your soulmate won’t be a romantic one because they’re a member of your family or someone you hate.

 

Things you don’t expect: to be told that your soulmate is gallivanting in some alternate universe you have no possibility to reach. Even if a soulmate doesn’t automatically mean a romantic interest, people usually are happier when they’re near. And I’d be happy if I could just break his legs in payment of all the shit he’s put me through.

 

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope,” he pops the p like some obnoxious teenager, and I’m about to flip it when he points at the NO REFUNDS sign hanging on the opposite wall next to the deer head.

 

“Can you even contact someone in a parallel universe?”

 

He’s scratching at his arm again.

 

“Yeah, with a jumper,” the reader says rolling his eyes, voice dripping with sarcasm.

 

Instead of replying I stand up and walk away.

 

Megan’s reading is way quicker than mine, and she comes out silent and somber, staring off into the distance and worrying her lip. She stays quiet the whole the ride back home and then shuts herself up in her room. I am afraid to ask.

 

We’d been living together for three years since we graduated university. The flat is tiny and cute: Megan did all the decorating finding random pictures and beautiful pieces of furniture, handmade by starving artists. Decorating’s always been one of her passions, and she puts a lot of attention on the little details. We manage to keep it pretty tidy, considering how messy I usually am.

 

As a testimony of my messiness, my room’s a chaos of unfinished books and boxes full of supplies from when I start a new hobby and abandon it halfway through before finishing anything - my parents always said I should be more persistent- piles of half-folded clothes littering the chairs and spilling out of a closet that can’t be closed anymore.

 

We spend the day cooked up in our separate rooms: she doing whatever and me playing violent video games and mulling over the new information I’ve gathered on my soulmate. I must admit it was a little bit depressing. You see, until now I had bits and pieces of my mate. I supposed he was gallivanting the galaxy, being a soldier, maybe on a Mars colony or something. Not, you know, completely unreachable. But well… I’ve always had that sort of luck that makes people cringe a little: born in the wrong body, at the wrong time, too awkward, always a little bit too early or too late. So, of course, my soulmate would be impossible to contact.


	2. Chapter 2

I wake to the noise of a violent pounding in our tiny living-room/kitchen. When I step outside rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, Megan is aggressively ripping the wallpaper from the walls. She has put down the bookcase, stacking all our books on the floor in awkward piles that seem about to topple over.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“What does it look like? I am redecorating,” growls Megan, at her feet Mittens stares unimpressed at me.

 

Mittens is our insanely attractive neighbor’s pure-white Norwegian Forest cat. He has long soft fur and beautiful blue eyes flecked with gold, the tendency of sneaking into our apartment nearly every day and always taking Megan’s side. Which is rude, since I am the house's cat-fan and the one who buys him the fancy cat-food that we sometimes feed him. Megan buys him plain tuna cans that she sometimes shares with him. Which – you know – is kinda gross.

 

Megan gives a powerful pull on the wallpaper and promptly topples over with a colorful curse, sending one of the book towers crashing to the floor.

 

“But why?” I ask stepping over another pile of books to help her up and then rip the rest of the paper off the wall. Our neighbor and I are usually exploited for our height and strength whenever Megan is in re-decorating mood – which usually never entails so much force and violence on her part.

 

“Because I am sick of butterflies!”

 

I frown.

 

Megan’s made of fluff, butterflies, unicorns and all things girly. Literally, hates her hair because she cannot pull off a pink dress with her humongous mess of red curls. Her being sick of butterflies is like saying you’re sick of cute baby animals.

 

“Since when?”

 

“Since today, ok? If you’re not going to help me get rid of all of this crap, then go back to your games, and I’ll do it myself!”

 

The outburst takes us both by surprise because she’s sweet and kind and not prone to any sort of aggressiveness. She even forces me to go to yoga class with her and to meditate every day for at least half an hour to keep “my spirit young and happy” – which it doesn’t, it just leaves me with a sore ass from sitting on the floor and pins and needles in my legs.

 

“What’s this all about, Meg?“

 

She huffs and lets herself fall on our couch. Mittens goes automatically up onto her lap, Megan pushes him off, but when he jumps back up, she doesn’t react.

 

“Is this about the reading? “

 

She is crying softly, scratching behind the cat’s ears. I sigh. She doesn’t need to say, and I feel kind of a heel for not comforting her yesterday when it was evident she was upset.

 

“Meg… I-I’m… I’m sorry. “

 

And I am. Having a soulmate was her dream. She is the one obsessed, who reads the magazines and watches all the movies and shows. She even got me to watch “GUESS WHO?” a reality show in which people are forced to live with two other, and at the end, the contestants have to guess who their soulmate is.

 

I sit next to Megan and she buries her face in my shoulder.

 

“I-I was s-so sure,” she sobs softly, squishing the cat in her arms.

 

“Come on, Megs, it’s not that bad. This doesn’t mean anything. There are tons of people who don’t have a soulmate and find love and shit.”

 

“Marriages between soulmates have a 70% chance less of divorce,” sobs Megan into Mittens’ fur. The cat looks resigned, but for once doesn’t squirm trying to get away.

 

“Well my parents were soulmates, and they still hated each other’s guts.”

 

“I wanted what my parents had, you know? They were together for thirty-five years.”

 

Her parents died in a car crash a few years back, that’s when we started sharing the flat because I had to get away from my mom and Megan didn’t want to be alone. She comes from a huge family, but all her brothers and sisters are older than her and were already married and had families of their own.

 

"Come on, we’re watching sappy movies,” I say standing up and marching over to her room.

 

“We should finish decorating,” her voice is way too soft to be a real protest.

 

I fetch our Emergency Movie Pack- twelve terribly sappy, incredibly predictable romantic movies that threaten to give you diabetes if you even look at the covers for too long - from her freakishly tidy room. When I come back, Megan is already making popcorn in the microwave.

 

***

 

We’re halfway through the seventh movie when someone knocks on our front door and opens it slowly.

 

“Megs? Alex?”

 

Mittens perks up instantly from where he’s curled in Megan’s lap. We’re engrossed in the tearful story of firefighter Mike and single mom Ellen, so we are somewhat slower to realize that our insanely hot neighbor is awkwardly standing in the mess that is currently our living-room/kitchen.

 

“Good evening, ladies,” smiles Leonidas with his fucking movie star smile – he even has dimples, for crying out loud! – and all we can do for a minute is blink at him like two stupefied owls.

 

“Leonidas,” manages Megan - who will under no circumstance abbreviate a name - voice thick and nasal from all the crying, “what are you doing here?”

 

His handsome smile turns into a handsomely shy smile – next to me Meg shudders from head to toe. Not that I can blame her, it’s a very nice look on him with his slightly crooked black-rimmed glasses and his freckled tanned cheeks.

 

“I was looking for my cat,” he says pointing at Mittens.

 

“Oh. Oh! Sorry.”

 

Meg jumps like she’s been burned, hurrying over the piles of books, pieces of wallpaper and shelves and thrusting the cat into Leonidas’ arms. He laughs softly, readjusting his glasses.

 

Mittens meows indignantly, looking dejected.

 

“It’s not a big deal you know that.” It isn’t, Leonidas comes in every other day to retrieve his cat. “I just worried because by now he usually comes back home.” Which is only half true, since, yeah, the cat loves us and we’ll steal him if we ever move out.

 

Megan and I turn to the digital clock beneath the TV, where the red 20:55 glares at us, condemning our laziness.

 

“Holy shit, we should be making dinner!” Movie forgotten, Meg rushes into the kitchen. She’s one of those people who believe in healthy food-schedules and eating fruit and vegetables at least once a day.

 

“You wanna stay, Leo? We could just heat up a pizza!” I call after my friend.

 

“We have only pepperoni and Hawaiian, which is gross, by the way!”

 

“Not true. Hawaiian is the best. And it has fruit on top, so it follows your stupid feeding rules!”

 

“But Leonidas is vegan.”

 

He laughs, low and rich.

 

“I am not vegan. My ex is vegan. I’d love some pizza. Just let me put something to eat for this little one.”

 

“We have cat food.”

 

“It’s Premium cat food,” I say to Mittens who just looks at me like it’s obvious that we have fancy food ready for him at any given time.

 

Leonidas lets go of the cat and walks over to the cabinet to fetch a few plates, by which point I am guilted into helping set up the small table in front of the TV. While we wait for the pizzas to be done we squeeze onto our sofa, watching the frozen frame of the movie.

 

“Is that Fires of Paradise?” asks Leonidas picking some of the leftover popcorn from the bowl, feeding some of the unpopped corns to Mittens and wolfing down the rest, while Megan and I try to hide or covertly throw away all the used tissues strewn around us. “Man, I love this movie!” he grins at Megan,  sitting comfortably against my side.


	3. Chapter 3

I trip on the shelves on my way to the bathroom and back because I refuse to turn on the lights before six thirty A.M., and my super job ensures that I have to be out of my comfortable bed and on the freezing streets by six o two. Our apartment is, as a rule, extremely tidy, so that’s usually not a big deal.

 

I stumble out of our flat followed by the satisfying crash of the last standing book pile. For once, I am only three minutes late. I still miss the bus and have to run three blocks to catch the only other bus that will allow me to arrive on time. The only good thing about starting work at this unholy hour is that there’s nobody on the bus and I can choose my favourite seat in the back.

 

I work at a Customer Care Centre because I thought it would be a good idea to be a designer in today’s economy and didn’t just drag my lazy ass through engineering or programming or something useful like that. So I was one of the two hundred graduates my university thrust into an oversaturated market, where designers don’t seem to be needed anymore. Not that I have a lot of talent, to begin with, I was average in college and am still average four years later. So CCC it is.

 

The office is full of artsy types withering away in front of boring grey computer screens, listening to old grandmas’ complaining about a service they don’t know how to use.

 

Megan was luckier than me: she graduated top of her class in music school, and, even though that doesn’t mean much nowadays, she still got her jobs. She plays in a fancy restaurant three times a week, makes soundtracks for theatre clubs and sometimes gets to play as an understudy in the Opera House – which pays handsomely. She’s an incredible pianist, and I am secretly very, very jealous of her many talents. It’s like she has an innate talent for everything she touches, it is frustrating, but I love her.

 

I get to the office just on time and am logged in right as the clock strikes seven. As always our manager is pissed, which is never a good way to start a Monday. Malcolm waves at me, already talking with a customer. 

 

I spend my next eight hours talking with irritable clients who want real solutions instead of the crappy answers in our solution database. I get to talk to six retired, really old customers that keep me on the phone for nearly an hour each. Trying to walk them through cleaning their browser history and change user settings on their out-dated browsers using descriptions like “that big yellow button on the top right corner, no, the right corner, beneath the picture of a cog. No, no, a _coG_ , ma'am, it’s round like a doughnut with spikes” instead of the every-day-really-not-that-obscure-computer-terms-that-are-already-in-every-every-day-dictionary that I sometimes struggle to remember myself – is by far the most fun I get to have on my job. 

 

Most of my co-workers are happy to forward every senior citizen to me since they hate them with a passion. Which is fine by me, because seniors always fill in the Satisfaction Survey and I get to collect the best ratings. I calculated that making twelve seniors happy a month gives you enough positive feedback to cash in two hundred click bonus every month. 

 

Lena- my left side neighbour – is livid, because she’s an overachiever who makes twice as many tickets as the rest of us. But she’s short tempered and quick with her work. Also has the charm of a rotten potato. She always gets the hard customers that complain about everything even if they’re in the wrong.

 

While I collect my things to go, Lena is pressing her fist to her temple and positively growling through her teeth: “What do you mean it doesn’t appear? I can see it right there. Right next to the mouse.”

 

“What’s the problem?” I mouth at her, but she just mutes the line and puts the headset back with an exasperated huff. I can hear the tiny voice of the customer blabbing on and on with a shrill and insistent voice that I hate.

 

“Fucking system crashed again, so I can’t take control of her mouse. I just need her to click on OK and type the PING. But she won’t listen.”

 

I sigh. Lena’s one of the few people in the office I actually like.

 

Since we’re all artsy failures, there’s a lot of ego going around in these four walls, and so much ego in one room cannot be good. But Lena is funny and fair. We usually eat together in our rushed 25-minute break.

 

“Come on, let me.”

 

She unmutes the line and gives me the headset. I read the woman’s name from her file and proceed to walk her through the steps to get the information Lena needs and then pass her back and head for the door. Not bothering with the email to inform my supervisor that I am leaving 10 minutes later than usual. After so many hours in the office, my brain feels like mashed potatoes, and the only thing I crave is the sun and some fresh air.

 

I made a list back when I started working at the CCC of the pros and cons of this job. The list is taped to the side of my closet, and I make a point of reading it once or twice a week. Because I know it could be way worse. Most of my college friends haven’t managed to find a job, or are fighting their way through four or five part-time jobs. That’s one of the major pros.

 

The fact that I am free at four o’clock and have all the time in the world to do stuff is another.

 

Like every Monday I walk to the small café downtown where I meet with Chris and Jake, two of my best friends. Both are bloggers with which I used to roleplay back in my teenage years. Chris and Jake have a video-game-and-movie-review blog which I helped design – my first design job, which has helped me gain some customers in the blogging industry – not many since most anyone can create their own blog, but.

 

When I arrive, Chris is already there, nose buried in his laptop and coffee forgotten next to his phone. I slide in the bench opposite from him and take out my own phone, waiting to see how long it will take him this time to notice me this time. Jake is running late – like always.

 

Chris can forget there’s a world around him whenever he’s immersed in a task. If you rile him up enough while walking, he’ll even crash against trees, lamppost and bins. I used to have a crush the size of a house on him, but I guess I grew out of it – mostly by the time he met the girl who’s now his wife. She’s cool. She has an ugly poodle and works retail, which is a worse job than mine since you cannot mute a person that’s standing in front of you. So, there’s that.

 

Jake manages to haul his gigantic ass to the café half an hour later, which is a new record even for him. He’s sweating, and his balding head shines with it. He barges in, zeroing on us instantly – which isn’t hard since we always sit at the same table – and stumbles over to us.

 

“Hey, losers!”

 

He lets himself fall next to Chris, who finally manages to drag himself out of the computer, blinks owlishly at me and asks:

 

“When did you get here?”

 

“On time.”

 

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Chris is always sheepish whenever he loses focus of what happens around him. I just shrug.

 

The only one who manages to keep him in the Here and Now is Jake, and that’s only because they’re soulmates and they’re very much in sync.

 

“I needed some me time.”

 

“Well, that’s hurtful,” mumbles Jake waving the teenage waiter over.

 

Chris takes a sip of his forgotten coffee and makes a face before emptying six sugar packets in his cup.

 

“How’s life?” asks Jake, clearly itching to tell us about his new dating APP.

 

Jake is a dating-APP expert and also the only one I know who meets ordinary people and goes on dates regularly – ‘a new girl every two months until I find The One’ is his life motto. He’s a very smooth sweet-talker and seems to always know what to say to get into girls’ pants.

 

Jake tells us about this babe he’s seeing – for three days in a row now – and shows us pictures of a petite geeky-looking black girl in an offensively yellow shirt with the words EAT MEAT on a swirly blue printed across the chest.

 

“She’s awesome,” he says looking at the picture completely enamoured. “A nurse at a children’s hospital. We’ve been texting for three weeks now and met on Friday. It kind of escalated into a three-day-long date.”

 

“Aw,” Chris smiles. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve found your soulmate.”

 

Jake throws his arms around Chris.

 

“You know I wouldn’t replace you. How would I get out of my asthma attacks when I forget the inhaler?”

 

Chris doesn’t even try to shake him off.

 

Chris and Jake met in preschool and have been best friends ever since. They’re the kind of soulmates that have such a strong bond that they even share thoughts, not only physical hurts like me and my stupid other-dimension-soulmate and they’ve taken advantage of it in every way imaginable. They got a lot of bullying in high school when everyone is a little bit stupid and thinks that just because you share a soul with someone you’re automatically fucking each other.

 

“Yeah, I feel so much love.”

 

Jake slaps a noisy kiss on Chris’ cheek and grins fondly.

 

“So, what about you two? Anything cool happened?”

 

I am about to tell them about my soulmate stranded on another dimension, but end up biting my tongue in the last minute. I still don’t really know why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always this was unbetad.
> 
> thanks so much for reading and commenting

**Author's Note:**

> So... did you hate it? Love it? I'd love some feedback :)  
> As always this was unbetad. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and commenting


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